October 24, 2019

Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning (JCAL) presents the Where-in: 2019 ARTWorks, Inc Two Fellow Artist-in-Residence Show featuring the works of Ifeatuanya (Ify) Chiejina and Julian Louis Phillips. These two fellow artists were participants in FY19 ARTWorks, Inc., a professional development artist residency & seminar series. The exhibition, which runs from October 10 – November 9, 2019, with an Artist Reception on October 24th from 6-9pm. This show culminates the artists’ creative endeavors, and celebrates the work that they have created during their artist-in-residence at JCAL.

(Ify) Chiejina is a process-based visual artist born and raised in Queens, NY. Chiejina is a black Igbo female with ideas, thoughts, and truths that are rooted and reflective of different customs and traditions. As a Nigerian-American, she considers the tensions and complexities that come with being brought up in an African household in a western society. Chiejina completed her B.A in philosophy from Queens College. She is also one of the founding members for the Southeast Queens Artist Alliance (SEQAA).

Chiejina creates a series of figurative paintings to show painting as a laborious endeavor of building communal relationships with others in trust and love. She practices the art of painting as a way of self-education, improving her ability to love others despite unfairness, injustice, and agonies we often find in our daily life. Her painting aims to dismantle the negative belief that one should not trust anyone. While growing up in our affluent but competition-driven neoliberal society, she has become accustomed with suspiciousness of others. The canvas is a battlefield of her inner struggles with herself and a process of unlearning what she has learned. The intention is to be reborn as a new person while cultivating a strong sense of autonomy and pride. Being close to the nature of human as socially collective is approached through painting, an act of communicating and “establishing new connections with people in order to access meaningful relationships.”

Julian Louis Phillips is a New York-based performance artist and sculptor. He received his MFA from Social Practice Queens at Queens College and has exhibited his work throughout the North East. In his work, he critically explores the relationship between the social and structures of injustice. He has been a fellow artist at More Art and a resident artist at NARS Foundation. Currently, he is making new performance and video work that explores our relationship with popular mobile-based media.

Phillips creates performance and structure arts to expose the contradictory tension between our collective vision of building an equal society and our continuing normative attitudes that are systematically discriminatory. The purpose is to bring people together to engage in public discourses exploring these dilemmas found in personal or collective endeavors to promote justice and equity. Capturing the present as a tangled explosive unrest where the future and the past clash, instead of a smooth linear passage from the past to the future, Phillips argues that the dilemma lies in how we perceive and speak about the problems. In his art, he proposes new ways of re-articulating and restructuring the problems while trying to embody different perspectives.

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